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Energy consumption of CUDA kernels with varying thread topology

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Computer Science - Research and Development

Abstract

The energy consumption and energy awareness of modern GPGPU devices becomes important with large GPGPU based system installations. Measurements of the average power consumption have been done and their predictions are reported in literature. However, by observing several repeatable impacts on energy consumption within our experiments we conclude that the available models are limited to ideal scheduling behavior. This conclusion results from relating the noticed impacts to the scheduling mechanisms on GPGPUs. Past work assumed that the consumed energy is considered to be linearly dependent on the thread count, but as we show this is only valid if perfect scheduling is feasible. We demonstrate this by revealing nonlinear increases of energy consumption in several particular cases. Thus we conclude that linear models for predicting the energy consumption are not always reliable.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Matthias Noack and Florian Wende for valuable discussions. This work is funded by the German Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) project ENHANCE, grant No. 01IH11004A-G.

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Correspondence to Sebastian Dreßler.

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Dreßler, S., Steinke, T. Energy consumption of CUDA kernels with varying thread topology. Comput Sci Res Dev 29, 113–121 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0230-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00450-012-0230-4

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